About Lino

Lino is an artist, humorist, and occasional responsible adult. He is the co-founder of a challenge-based LEGO car club called LUGNuts which boasts over 1100 members worldwide. He proposed automotive building challenges every month for ten years (120 challenges!) which he and the other members built accordingly. LUGNuts has retired its challenges on its 10th anniversary but still remains a cornerstone for LEGO automotive builders. Between his artistic work and LEGO builds, Lino has been published in several books, including Beautiful LEGO, Beautiful LEGO: Dark, and Beautiful LEGO: Wild. He lives in Washington with his girlfriend and dogs.

Posts by Lino

This Star Wars AT-ST was made for walking. That’s because it’s motorized!

LEGO builder xelabricks tells us that this is their first time posting on Flickr, and yet already they’ve dialed in on the formula for success. Anything Star Wars will pretty much become a blip on our radar but it’s great detail like this that will perk our senses. I love the trees and the forested base, but the real star of the show is the highly-detailed AT-ST, or “chicken walker” seen on the forest moon of Endor in films such as Return of the Jedi.

Forest Skirmish

But what pushes this creation into the stratosphere is the Power Functions that make this walker appear to…well, walk. Check out the video below to see what I mean. With LEGO creations this good, we’ll surely look forward to whatever else this builder comes up with.

Keeping score on the Andean Quipu

One of the benefits of being a TBB contributor (besides limited use of the headquarters hot tub) is you learn new things about the world. Take this rather unconventional LEGO creation by Mattia Careddu for example. Is it the newest trend on the catwalk? Or is it some sort of facehugger monster? It turns out, it’s an Andean Quipu, a device, according to the internet, used for recording everything from tax information to land ownership to census records to military organization during the time of the Inka Empire. Highly specialized Quipu readers were even hired to read the complex series of fiber and knots in order to settle court cases. The only thing I can decipher from this particular LEGO creation is that someone can tie a sweet figure-eight knot. However, a skilled reader would surmise that I probably shouldn’t have claimed my dogs as dependants on my taxes. Also, I’ve been denied access to the TBB hot tub.

Andean Quipu

Bela Lugosi is dead but the LEGO Art Legends of Goth mosaic set is very much alive [April Fools’!]

LEGO has revealed a new mosaic set featuring Legends of Goth. The adult-targeted set contains 7,182 pieces, a large brick separator, and instructions and extra parts to build all five album cover designs by The Cure, Bauhaus, Sisters of Mercy, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. This set comes with a curated soundtrack that is downloadable via a QR code and will enable fans to listen to their favorite Goth albums while building.

The LEGO Goth Legends set comes in a box the size of a large pizza and will retail for US $219.99 | CAN $299.99 | UK £250.99 with a global release date of May 1st.

descend further down the spiral to see more

The Blacktron II Cosmic Gemini bursts the nostalgic bubble

This latest LEGO creation by builder Librarian-Bot takes us to the nostalgic sweet spot in the early 90s when fake glasses and Zupaz pants were cool- or so I thought. Looking back, it is quite possible anyone sporting fake specs, a crystal necklace, and baggy psychedelic weightlifter pants when clearly not being a weightlifter was never cool but a boy can dream, right? It’s like this creation, with its bold black-and-white color scheme and transparent bubble canopies whisks us away to a time when wanting to sex you up and being down with OPP (whatever that means) was a badge of honor. Maybe it’s time to don my Zupaz once again get out my little black book from 1991 and give a few hunnys a call. The pants had an elastic waist so fitting them onto my now paunchy frame shouldn’t be an issue at all.

Blacktron 2 Cosmic Gemini

And like my Zupaz pants, this vehicle also houses two mini-spaceships and a hidden rover.

Blacktron 2 Cosmic Gemini

This Hollow Knight collaboration bugs me quite a bit

I have a special place in my heart for LEGO collaborations; collabs, as the cool kids call them. We have a bevy of cool kids in this article collab-ing on characters from the Hollow Knight video game, so get out your pencils and take some notes. First up is the Watcher Knight, a blue beetle guy built by (I presume) the coolest kid of them all, Sandro Quattrini. I like his stance and there are surely some neat parts usage here. Truth be told, I needed the help of Wikipedia to clue me in on the Hollow Knight game but I’m well aware of its influences such as Metroid, The Legend of Zelda, and Mega Man X. Incidentally, the heyday of those games precisely mark the end of my coolness and my foray into being a middle-aged schlub and occasional public nuisance.

Watcher Knight

Click to see what the other cool kids are into

Star Wars; going through some Dark Times

The brilliant thing about a huge franchise like Star Wars is once you’ve established a look and feel, once you’ve established some rules, Star Wars can keep expanding into infinity. The Brothers Brick alum Mansur Soeleman presents a LEGO diorama of the Mos Sakàa Town Center from the Star Wars: Dark Times RPG. I can wax ad nauseam about the major release movies all day, but I’m a bit less polished when it comes to some parts of the Expanded Star Wars Universe. With that said, I’ll let Mansur do the talking in his own words. “The people of Antolous I have scraped together a humble life on this rock. Few settlements dot the harsh orange landscape, but the oasis town of Mos Sakàa is the de facto capital of the desert planet. Built up from the ruins of a watchtower, Cestila Marroquin’s humble cantina serves as a seedy hub for the revolt against the invading empire…”

Mos Sakàa Town Centre

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For those who like their dragons breaded and fried

I bet if dragons were real someone would figure out how to slather them in Panko breadcrumbs, deep fry, then eat them. Now, thanks to this innovative LEGO creation by Woomy World called the Tempura Dragon we don’t have to imagine too hard what that could look like. Normally reserved for autumn shrubbery, the builder went with generous portions of yellow-orange leaf bricks to replicate the delicious breaded texture of tempura. The “shrimp-like” tail further cements this notion rather brilliantly. I mean, who can resist a plate of tempura shrimp when it comes by on the conveyor belt? An alternate theory is this dragon only looks like Tempura in order to tempt foolish humans into its lair, then it’s scorch-city. There are currently people who climb into bear cages at the zoo in hopes of a great selfie so that notion doesn’t seem too far-fetched.

Tempura Dragon

A Star Wars Fabuland hangar with a special feature for folks dealing with sight loss

We seem to love the LEGO theme of Fabuland here at The Brothers Brick. We’re also big fans of Star Wars, in case you haven’t figured that out. So naturally, when Stewart Lamb Cromar posted his new Fabuland Tie Fighter hangar, we were pretty thrilled. The Darth Vader TIE Fighter and the army of Perry Pandas looking very much like stormtroopers are quite charming. What we didn’t expect, however, was to learn that Stewart has been dealing with sight loss. As a result, this hangar, which would have normally taken him a few weeks to construct, took nearly a year factoring in eight eye surgeries and their associated recovery time. For individuals such as himself, Stewart included an extraordinary feature built into the detailing of this hangar.

Fabuland Hangar ????????????

Click to discover what I mean

The most important rover of the day

If breakfast is the most important meal of the day, then I declare this LEGO bacon and eggs creation by Maxx Davidson to be the most important rover of the day. No, seriously, if you can find a more important rover today let us know in the comments, because I don’t think you will. The bacon and eggs rover is (cleverly) piloted by a chicken and a pig. (It’s their own fault for being delicious!) They are exploring a bevy of breakfast delights including some fruit, a buttered pancake, a hot cup of coffee with some sweetener, and sausage links. Gosh, I hope those are sausage links! Anyway, this was built for Febrovery 2024, which seems to be cooking along nicely.

Bacon and eggs rover exploring a world of breakfast delights! Built for Febrovery 2024

Super Soakers brought on the fun and sometimes lawsuits

This LEGO creation built by David Manfred reminds me of one of the more joyous memories from my childhood; it was only one instance and one we couldn’t replicate again, even if we tried. Somehow, probably during a hot summer, the stars and the universe aligned just right and we spontaneously made a fifty-kid Super Soaker battle royale happen. Clearly, we were not classy growing up, and the act would probably lead to a dozen lawsuits nowadays, but it was a spectacular thing at the time. I’m not a religious person but, in that moment of glory, it was one of two instances in which I felt closest to God; the other involved throwing a wardrobe out a fifth-story window as part of a summer demolition crew in college. I guess I’m saying I feel best when causing trouble.

Super Soaker Fight

Perhaps it’s time I light up a flaming bag of poo and show my neighbor’s doorstep what’s what. Anyway- thanks for the memories, David!

The Metroid Queen; the baddest baddy of them all

I am loving these LEGO Metroid creations as of late. It takes me back to the late 80’s when my brother and I would play it on our Nintendo system. The music and sound effects were as extra-terrestrial as they come, the alien baddies were totally awesome and finding out the main protagonist, Samus Aron, was female at the end; priceless! I recall the revelation squigged some kids out at school but I was all for it. The big boss at the end, as it turns out, was also a lady of sorts. She was responsible for laying all the Metroid eggs and defending her brood with all her armor-plated, teeth-gnashing glory. Benjamin Anderson has recreated the Metroid Queen nicely, even including the transparent organ at her abdomen that was her well-guarded weak point. The only way to defeat her was to get her to ingest bombs or power bombs. It was no easy feat, by golly!

The Metroid Queen

This booty be hoppin’!

Seeing this LEGO creation by EMazingbrix reminded me of the adage that you can’t take it with you. I mean, life can certainly hand you some very delicious lemons but it all has to go somewhere after you’ve crossed the rainbow bridge. Take this pirate captain, for example; he was so darned close to his treasure! I’m no medical expert but I also get the hunch he’s very much expired, thus leaving that luscious booty out in front of God and everybody for someone else to pillage and plunder. Plus, EMazing (can I call you Emazing?) has used twelve frogs in accordance with a build challenge over at Iron Forge, which makes it extra hoppin’. If you’ll excuse me, I need to fetch a youngster in TBB’s IT department to help me set up a TikTok account so I can see all this hoppin’ booty I’ve heard so much about.

The Captain's Treasure